I'm the Director of Educational Outreach at SuretyBonds.com, which is an online insurance agency. I primarily focus on writing informative articles that help stakeholders such as entrepreneurs and small business owners better understand the surety market.

Our problem is that we let the "boring" nature of our industry infiltrate too many of our blog posts, which tend to be purely informational in nature. After reading this, I definitely want to inject some RWS into our posts in the near future. Our other two major problems are 1) attracting an audience (repeating the "boring" nature of our blog) and 2) updating consistency (because we have sooooo many other online marketing projects going on). Blogging can easily fall to the bottom of the priority list. September 25, 2012

That's a good point. If Google moves to AR, I'd have to assume most credible sites wouldn't have a problem adding a link to give their writers the credit they deserve from Google. It just means more work will have to be done to stay on Google's good side (whether by guest authors or the sites on which they've been published). But hey, what else is new ;)September 25, 2012

Unfortunately, I fully agree with this. If Google switches to this system at any point in the future, I will be sad not to get SEO credit/credibility for quality articles just because they were written before AR. Granted, that credit didn't exist before the rel=author tag anyway, so it's not like you're LOSING credit; you just might not be able to get all the credit you deserve. September 25, 2012

Per the advice of some wise colleagues, I began using the rel=author tag to link my guest articles (on certain high quality sites) with my Google+ profile months ago. After reading this article, I better understand the importance of doing so.

As somebody who fully believes in creating quality content that readers can actually use, I love the IDEA of Author rank, but I question whether it will be implemented smoothly.

My primary concern is this: How are we, as content writers, supposed to get the *magical* Google Author Rank credit for quality articles we wrote years ago? I might be missing something, but it seems to me the only way that Google will attribute content to its writer in AR is if there's a Google+ link in the article/bio, which older posts obviously won't have.

So it seems there won't be a way for us to claim (a.k.a. get credit) for older, content published on quality sites unless we can convince the current site owner to add another link into our bylines. That seems like a lot of work to do just to further satisfy the Google bots (but hey, what else is new?)September 21, 2012